


Pius: Sign of the Free

by chucklingChemist



Series: Alternian Snapshots [9]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Fantrolls, Gen, Multiple Heiresses, No Dialogue, very minor though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 19:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19091887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chucklingChemist/pseuds/chucklingChemist
Summary: You are Mayola Yoscan. The Heiress. Free to do whatever, yet for some reason bound to train for a position you don't want and never will....Or are you?





	Pius: Sign of the Free

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Alternate Alternia, which can be found [here](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eigi1eombfqxvc8/AAA_gOFEaQ3FxQrh8tnwVxPDa?dl=0). Crossposted my fic with permission from the admins. I highly recommend you check out the other art and fic, it's all choice!

_Sit down and pay attention! You’re a fuschia, the hemospectrum should be second nature to you. You can barely tell the difference between the rust castes._

_Come on. It’s basic etiquette I’m teaching you, not advanced xenobotany. If a lumbering clown can understand which fork to use, so can you._

_I realize you have no chance of ever being Empress, but that doesn’t change you must apply yourself! Actually try to do something impressive for once in your life._

_Can you stop drawing your ridiculous ideas for two seconds and listen to -- oh my goodness, really? Knives in your shoes? Get your thinkpan out of the clouds and back to studying. You might be Empress one day, and all you’ll have to show for it is your clothing._

_You need to grow up, Mayola. I realize you lack the usual ancestry of our superior breed, but you’re the fucking Heiress. Do something about it._

Their voices, all identical to the core, reel in your head. Every single one of them were your useless tutors: variants of noble blood that only seemed to fuel their inescapable aura of pompous jackassery. They pricked their claws into everything you tried, built it up as a good decision just to tear it down as something you should _never_ do. They obviously jumped at the chance for an opportunity to teach an Heiress. Any level of care toward you as a person outside a vessel for their own social climbing was null. You could see it from a mile away.

So you fired them. 

Not immediately. Not at first. At first you kept them around because well...because you’re supposed to. That’s what they said, anyway. But in the same breath, they’d remind you how you, an Heiress, had absolute power and needed to learn to wield it properly. It was the final straw to trigger in your head to fire the first one. But firing them was like whacking burrowbeasts -- where one fell, two more took their place. Except these burrowbeasts whined, _saying oh no don’t use it like that. We’re just trying to help._

Bullshit. They were trying to shut you up. Trying to prepare you for a winless fight against an adult troll with hundreds, if not _thousands_ of sweeps ahead of you. A troll who had beat out the previous Empress, and who knows how many generations of other pink bitches like yourself who dared challenge the throne. 

All of this ignoring you aren’t the only Heiress. Your generation appears to have a genetic anomaly of not just two, but four fuchsiabloods all at once: two lines with a history of leadership, one line known through her legends of chaos, and you. No ancestor, no lineage, nothing to speak of. By that factor alone, you’re the least likely candidate to even succeed against the other three. 

But when you’d bring that up, your tutors would chide you, pat your head and remind you of your ultimate fate. How it was written into your biology, nay, _written into the stars themselves_ , due to your noble blood (accidental hatching you might’ve been), to vie for the throne. They didn’t care your apparent destiny was to die by trident. It just had to be. Your own say in it? What you wanted to do with your life? Fuck that. You were just a card in some stupid game of Solitaire to keep the caste system going, making the other castes hope for change that’ll never come. Reckless idiot you may be, but even you realized _that_ much. 

Sure, every now and then, they might suggest you join the fleet instead. And what then? Enslave yourself to the eternal service of an Empress who wants nothing more than to cull you for merely existing instead of enslave yourself to the concept of _becoming_ Empress? With as contrary as you are? The mere thought of being stuck as some military general, living wholly by a routine with little breaks to do anything fun, dropped a weight in your stomach.

You’d sooner die.

You look up into the mirror in your ablutionblock ( _bathroom_ , the stupid voices in your head correct, _use the proper language_ ) and scream. What else can you do? The anger coursing through your veins only intensifies the longer you think about your situation, building and building with nowhere to go. You had no kismesis to pail. No moirail to calm you. No one you knew who’d begin to handle you as a matesprit. And running to the nearest town to fight a random landdweller? Impossible: even a brain-dead landdweller was too smart for that bait. A regular fish would struggle to find someone willing to go through with it. You were the lucky one to be a _pink_ fish. It only ramped up the difficulty. 

When you finally stop, you look into the mirror. It stares back at you with the same angry yellow eyes. The same soft, unmarred face and dark pink fins that only stretched further the long it stewed in its anger. The same curly horns and thick, long black hair that obviously hadn’t seen a proper day of battle in a good skirmish behind an alley. It even wore the same fully-covering, stupid pink sarong covered in little black swirls as you.

To say you didn’t like what stared back was an understatement.

With a scowl, you snatch a knife resting on your sink and send it through your long hair in a swift motion. The knife is duller than you expected, leaving a frayed, crude cut just above your shoulders that tickles your neck as you swish your hair back and forth. You kick the fallen hair off to the side to be taken care of later. It’s a dirty spot on an otherwise immaculately clean floor; a black hole among a sea of white. It feels fitting in a way you can’t describe, yet incomplete. Still, the euphoria of cutting your hair drives the knife through the bottom of the sarong next, stripping off fabric until it leaves no more than a short skirt and messy crop top. The loose threads feel unpleasant now, but the sheer glee that overtakes you from seeing the torn up remains of your so-called duty resting atop your hair swiftly buries it.

You look back up into the mirror again. The troll staring back has choppy hair and torn up clothes, but she’s still a prissy Heiress who, at some point, has to either lead a people she’s barely met or die brutally in a failed attempt to do so. Neither she, nor you for that matter, can remove the dark pink flush to your cheeks from working yourself up, marking you stuck for that stupid fate. 

The euphoric high from mere seconds ago rapidly shifts back into anger. You hate the bitch in the mirror. You hate everything she represents: hate that she looks like you, hate that she cut her hair, hate she balls her fist exactly like you, hate that she’s stuck with rules and obligations and expectations and fucking _politics_ , despite constantly being told how she can do whatever the hell she wants as the single highest caste. Those stupid voices are back in your head in full force now, jabbering away about stuff that _can_ and _can’t_ be done, _should_ be done, _must_ be done. They criticize to the girl in the mirror for all of her decisions. You bare your teeth into a snarl, eyes shut and fins fanning as far out as they can go. A couple tears well up in your eyes. You may not like her, but she doesn’t deserve that. 

She deserved freedom.

You feel, not see, your fist connect with the glass. Feel it reverberate down your arm and throughout your body, the shards pricking your hand and the blood running down your fingers. Hear the glass shatter. Pain shoots up your arm, coursing up and down with every thump of your blood pusher strong it forces the tears down your face. Pleasant? No. But the satisfied high it gives you makes the burning more than worth it. And when you finally open your eyes, seeing the broken remains of the troll in the mirror finally breaks the two of you into manic grins.

_You’re_ an Heiress. A fuchsiablood. The only troll aside from the Empress with absolute power on this desolate planet. Who decides the fate of the Heiress? Not society. Not the Empress. Most of all, not the painful speeches of highbloods insistent they could control someone they simultaneously insisted was better than them. 

Only you. You decide your fate.

You march out of the ablutionblock and into your respiteblock. For a seadweller, it’s a markedly simple room, if you ignored the racks of weapons hanging from the wall and clothes stashed away in the walk in closet. A few shelves for storage, some cushions for seating a couple open windows to let the moonlight stream and light up the pale wood, but that’s all. You grab a black messenger bag that you left sitting against your recuperacoon (“just in case,” you remember yourself saying just a perigee ago), hurriedly filling it with the few things you need: clothes, your palmhusk, money for food. All you’re missing is a weapon.

There’s a single double-ended trident hanging off the wall. It’s the very same trident that marks you as an Heiress, gold everywhere save for the splotchy silver patches from when you tried to paint it once in a fit of impulsivity. Not a bad weapon by any means. Good for stabbing when the time calls for it. Still, you’re drawn to the old-fashioned harpoon gun and snatch it off the rack instead. You have no idea _how_ old it was when your lusus led you to it, only that they sure didn’t make harpoon guns with real harpoons anymore. Plus, it doesn’t represent any sort of heritage about you. The aesthetic of the cool metal juxtaposed with the smooth wood, broken only by two symbols carved in -- one of which was already there when you found it, another one you carved yourself -- helped matters as well. 

A chilly breeze dances through the room, pushing the uneven edges of your hair across your neck. It makes you pause to shudder and sigh before sliding the straps of the bag and the gun across your shoulder.

Were you making the right decision? Maybe. Maybe not. At the same time, it was _your_ decision. That’s all that mattered.

You are the bastard, unwanted Heiress to the Alternian Empire, and for the first time in your life, you felt truly free.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to watch me freak out over flash bastards and their tartan partners, check me out on [my Tumblr](https://chuckling-chemist.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Yeah Good Omens has an adaptation so this is my life now. Welcome to Hea--Hel--somewhere.


End file.
